by Jane Haddam
Gregor went over to the booth and slipped in across from Bennis.
“What do you have in that thing?” Bennis asked. “It looks like you’re carrying rocks.”
“It feels like I’m carrying rocks,” Gregor said. “It’s my laptop plus enough paperwork to denude the forests, and none of it is going to make any difference that I can see. I have, however, had what you and Donna like to call an Aha Moment.”
“Really?” Bennis said. “About what?”
Debbie Melajian came over with her pad. “Bennis, are you going to stick to coffee or do you want something serious to drink? My mother was betting on something serious to drink.”
“I’ll have a Drambuie on ice,” Bennis said.
“I’ll have a double Scotch on the rocks except not much on the rocks. And make it Johnnie Walker Blue if you still have a bottle somewhere.”
“We’ve got it in the back for you,” Debbie said, “not that you drink it often. Do you want me to bring dinner after? Bennis has already had—”
“Imam bayildi,” Gregor said. “But give me about twenty minutes to finish the Scotch.”
“Absolutely,” Debbie said, and whisked away with her pad.
Bennis was giving him One of Those Looks. “I take it that whatever this Aha Moment was, it wasn’t good news,” she said.
Gregor shrugged. “It’s not good news and it’s not bad news. It’s just one of those things we all should have thought about before, but we didn’t.”
“And what’s that?”
“There’s a video out there that looks as if it shows Tibor pounding that gavel into Martha Handling’s head,” Gregor said.
Bennis snorted in exasperation. “Of course there is,” she said. “What do you think we’ve all been worried about from when this started—?”
“Yes, yes,” Gregor said, “but think about it. This was a juvenile court. They don’t go bonkers over cell phone cameras in adult courts anymore, but they still do in juvenile courts. You can’t take a cell phone into a juvenile court if the cell phone has a camera in it.”
Debbie brought over the drinks and put them down on little square napkins. Gregor picked his up and took a long gulp of it. You shouldn’t gulp Johnnie Walker Blue, but he didn’t care.
“Bennis,” he said. “The police are convinced that that video was made by a cell phone. But if it was made by a cell phone camera, it couldn’t have been made by anybody who came in through the front door of that courthouse except judges and security personnel, because they’re the only ones who aren’t walked through a metal detector and don’t have their pocketbooks and briefcases and backpacks X-rayed.”
“I still don’t see—”
“Bennis, think,” Gregor said. “And this is the problem with cases like this, where everybody thinks they already know what’s going on. None of the people we know were in that corridor leading to the corridor to the chambers could have had a cell phone on him. But if that video was made with a cell phone, somebody must have. The police are going to check all the cell phones of all the people who were there, but it isn’t going to make any difference, because all those phones will have been lying on the check-in table in little manila envelopes. None of those people could have brought a cell phone into Martha Handling’s chambers and taken that video. And no security personnel or other judges did that either, because none of those people were there until after the murder.”
Gregor felt a certain amount of satisfaction that Bennis was looking confused.
“Well,” she said, “maybe somebody had a digital camera, a cheap one, or something—”
“That would have been caught at the desk, too.”
“Somebody had to have taken that video. We all saw it. I still have the wretched thing on my phone.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “But the video has to have been taken by a phone brought in by somebody who didn’t come through the front.”
“And that would be?”
“The most obvious person,” Gregor said, “would be Martha Handling herself. She would have come in from the parking lot in the back, since she drove to work. She would have had her phone on her, obviously. There are only two things wrong with that.”
“What are those?”
“First,” Gregor said, “there’s the fact that the video was not taken on her phone. The police found her phone. They checked it out. The video was not taken with that. But there’s also the fact that the only way that video makes sense, or the only way I can see at the moment, is if somebody had the phone on him, walked in on the crime being committed, and started filming almost by remote control. But the way things are, that cannot be the way it happened. The secretaries and the assistants were all out at a funeral. The judges who were in were in their courts. Nobody unauthorized could have come through that back door either, because although the camera right at the door was blocked by paint, the other cameras in that parking lot weren’t.”
“So—what then?” Bennis asked. “Somebody didn’t walk in on Tibor? I don’t understand—”
“I think,” Gregor said, “that that video was staged, and it was staged with a readily available instrument. The police found Martha Handling’s phone. There must have been another phone, somewhere available.”
“What other phone?” Bennis asked. “Whose phone?”
“What if the rumors are true,” Gregor said, “and Martha Handling was taking bribes to put juveniles in jail for longer sentences than they would usually get for the kinds of crimes they committed. Let’s say she was doing that—would she take calls relating to that on her regular cell phone?”
“Oh, I see,” Bennis said. “You think she had another phone. Maybe one of those throwaway ones. And it was—what? Lying somewhere in plain sight?”
“Right,” Gregor said. “Someone walked into the room, saw Tibor doing whatever he was doing—”
“I’d like to know what that was,” Bennis said.
“Grabbed the phone and then did something with it,” Gregor said. “Whoever it was had to have taken the phone away. It’s entirely possible that Tibor didn’t even realize that the person was there, if he was in fact the person who committed the murder. If he wasn’t, and the scene was staged, then they staged it together. But whoever it was took the phone away, and the phone wasn’t found on him or her during the investigation. Which means that either the person ditched it, or he wasn’t one of the people found on the scene and interviewed immediately. And we’ve got a candidate for that. The guy who runs local operations for Administrative Solutions, the company that runs the prisons, was in the courthouse that day. And we’ve got security tape to prove it. And he’d want to take that phone away with him. And nobody would have checked him going out.”
Gregor saw Bennis’s face fall.
“It’s progress,” he said gently. “It’s not much, yet, but it’s progress. And that the man from Administrative Solutions killed Martha Handling over the bribes he was paying her makes more sense as a motive than that Tibor did it for no reason we’ve been able to find out yet.”
“But don’t you see?” Bennis said. “It doesn’t even start to prove that. If it was the way you just worked out, then this Adminstrative Solutions man still has to have come in to find Tibor pounding away with that gavel, and if that’s the case, then Tibor could still have committed the murder, and I just don’t—”
“Ahem,” somebody said, right next to Gregor’s ear.
Gregor would have jumped out of his seat, except that the way the booth was constructed wouldn’t allow it. He did bang his knee against the table’s wood.
Bennis looked frigid.
Standing next to their table was a squat, frazzled-looking woman in ballet flats and Native folk art jewelry. Gregor recognized her, but only vaguely. He thought of her as the lady that screamed.
“Excuse me,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry to bother you, but I’ve been waiting and waiting. For hours. Because you always come in. Then I thought you weren’t coming tonight
and I thought I’d go to your house and try there. It’s very important. My name is Janice Loftus, and I know all about Martha Handling.”
2
Bennis Hannaford Demarkian was the sanest woman Gregor knew, but every once in a while she took an instant dislike to somebody, and once she had done that, all bets were off. She took an instant dislike to the squat woman standing next to their table, and the reaction was so strongly visceral, Gregor had expected her to explode. The reality was that Bennis did not explode. When she was mortally, irrevocably offended, she got so polite, she could make your teeth bleed.
If Janice Loftus had noticed Bennis’s deep freeze, she gave no sign of it. Gregor guessed that she hadn’t noticed it. Janice Loftus was the kind of woman who wouldn’t notice much of anything, and especially wouldn’t notice other people’s reactions to her or anything else. She talked a mile a minute. Her eyes darted all around the room. Her hands fluttered and waved.
Then she pushed herself onto the bench beside Bennis and stared across the table at him.
Bennis moved because she had to. She was wearing the face of her own great-grandmother, who had been the most austere and unforgiving hostess on the Main Line. She had had to be, because she was married to a real live robber baron.
Debbie Melajian came over to the booth, looking just a little puzzled. “Can I get you something?” she asked Janice Loftus.
Janice Loftus looked back. “They’ve got something,” she said. “I don’t have to compromise myself any more than I already have. You should order in fair trade coffee, that’s what you should do. You’d get a lot more business from socially responsible diners.”
“I’ll get you some water,” Debbie said.
“The bottled water industry—”
“It’s just water from the tap,” Debbie said. Then she sped off toward the back.
Bennis looked like she was about to breathe fire.
“People are much smarter about these things than they used to be,” Janice Loftus said, “but not enough of them are, and too many people don’t care. Bottled water—corporations are taking over our water supply. What are we going to do when it’s gone? And what they call soft drinks—”
“Excuse me?” Gregor said. He said it because he didn’t want Bennis to say anything. And Bennis was about to say something.
“Oh,” Janice Loftus said. “Yes. Well, I’ll save that for another time. But it’s important, especially for prominent people. Americans are obsessed with celebrity, of course, that’s why nothing can ever get done. The plutocrats make sure there are lots of circuses, even if there isn’t a lot of bread. But we can use their tactics against them if we’re smart. The more celebrities who come out for fair trade and for—”
Debbie was back with Janice Loftus’s water and Gregor’s imam bayildi. Janice stared at the imam bayildi as if it were a space alien. Debbie got out of the way fast.
“Well,” Janice said. “That’s … that’s very … you don’t see that much anymore. Real food from real cultural cuisines. Everything’s franchised and frozen and packaged these days.”
Back in the days when Bennis smoked cigarettes, this was when she would have lit up.
Janice Loftus stared at the imam bayildi a little longer, as if it could tell her something she needed to know. Then she dragged her eyes back to Gregor and said, “I’m sorry to bother you in the middle of the night”—the apology was mechanical—“but I tried to talk to the police and nobody would listen to me. Except they kept trying to imply that I must have killed Martha because she used to be my roommate, which is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. If I was going to kill Martha because she was my roommate, I’d have done it when she actually was my roommate. And I thought about it. Let me tell you. I thought about it a lot.”
“Have you thought about it since?” Bennis asked.
Janice Loftus ignored her. “The thing is, she did it twice that I know of, and one more time that I don’t know of because of course I don’t belong to those kinds of clubs. But even twice is a pattern, isn’t it? And patterns are what matter. But the police are just being the police, and they won’t listen. I thought maybe you’d listen.”
“I’ll listen,” Gregor said. “To tell the truth, you were on my list to talk to eventually anyway.”
“Well, I hope it wasn’t about that nonsense about how I must have wanted to kill her because she used to be my roommate and I hated her,” Janice said. “I don’t hate people. It uses up too much energy and we need the energy, all we can get. There’s so much work to be done.”
“Martha Handling used to be your roommate,” Gregor said.
“At Bryn Mawr College,” Janice said. “You know what kind of place that is. One of the original Seven Sisters. All those rich girls with Porsches and cashmere sweaters and parents working on Wall Street. The teachers really tried to raise everybody’s consciousness, but it was a losing battle for most of those girls. They just absolutely believed they deserved every one of their privileges.”
“And Martha Handling was one of the ones who believed that?” Gregor asked.
“Well, yes,” Janice Loftus said. “Of course she believed that. Even I believed that in the beginning. It’s very hard to separate yourself from your background. And in those days, I just idolized my father. I thought he walked on water. I didn’t realize what he was doing to me. I didn’t realize that abuse didn’t have to be physical to be abuse.”
“Wait,” Bennis said. “Loftus. Patrick Loftus? You’re Patrick Loftus’s daughter?”
This time, Janice Loftus did look at Bennis. “Don’t sound so impressed. There’s nothing to be impressed with. It’s not like my father ever did any real work. He didn’t dig ditches or grow food. He wasn’t even a change agent. He was just a greedy man who knew where to get money.”
“Patrick Loftus,” Bennis said. “The man who founded Pacific Microsystems. The man who invented—”
“The very tool that lets the government spy on its citizens and get away with it,” Janice Loftus said. “If you think that’s an achievement, I think you live a very impoverished life.”
It was time to head this off at the pass.
“Let’s get back to Martha Handling,” Gregor said. “She was your roommate in your freshman year?”
“That’s right,” Janice Loftus said. “You could pick your own roommate if you already knew someone, and I did know someone, a girl in my house at Miss Porter’s, but, well, we didn’t get along, and I don’t think she wanted to room with me any more than I wanted to room with her. So I told the college to pick for me and I got Martha Handling.”
“And that was bad, too?” Gregor asked. “Right from the beginning?”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t too bad at the beginning,” Janice said. “I mean, the woman was a complete fascist, but I didn’t know about fascism then. And she was just like everybody else, really. Except the whole thing was her idea.”
“What was her idea?” Gregor asked.
“Patrick Loftus,” Bennis said. “Miss Porter’s. For God’s sake.”
Janice had gone back to ignoring her. “It was her idea that we should work together to cheat,” Janice said. “We all had this absolutely terrible teacher for history. He wanted everybody to know dates and all that kind of thing, and he went on about battles and things and he was really old and he had tenure. Bryn Mawr is a very progressive place. There are wonderful teachers there, teachers who understand gender and race and class and know how to put you right into history. And make you understand what things mean. But he wasn’t one of them, and he had tenure, of course, so we were stuck with him.”
“Why didn’t you drop the course?” Bennis asked.
“It got too late to do that,” Janice said, “and then it was a requirement if you wanted to take other history courses, and almost all of us wanted to do that because you have to if you want to major in Women’s Studies or political science or sociology. We had a test every third week, and when he handed back the first one, a lot
of us knew we were going to fail. We just knew it. There wasn’t going to be any way to avoid it. And that’s when Martha said she had the idea.”
“An idea to cheat,” Gregor said.
“Martha said that the reason people got caught cheating is that they went about it by themselves,” Janice said. “She said people who cheated were always ashamed of it, so they tried to hide it, not just from the authorities but even from themselves. So they did all the stupid stuff that everybody knew about already, and they got caught, because it wasn’t hard to catch them. She said what we ought to do was work as a team. She said if we worked as a team, it would be almost impossible to catch us, because no one of us would be doing any of the things they were expecting. Oh, I don’t know. It sounded good at the time, and I didn’t want to fail.”
“What could you have done that was so different?” Gregor asked.
“Martha said she’d seen it in a movie,” Janice said. “I don’t remember the name of the movie. It isn’t anything you’d recognize. The course was this big lecture thing twice a week, and then the class was broken up into seminar sessions that met at different times, with only ten people in each of them. And there were about ten of us, and only one of us in the first one. So, what we’d do, the one of us in the first session would take two copies of the test when it was handed out and also two blue books. Then that person would hand in her blue book very early and bring the extra copy of the test and the extra blue book back to the dorm and we’d make copies of it. And while we were doing that some of the others of us would be filling in the answers in the blue books. And then when that was done, when the seminar sessions were over, some other couple of us would find a way to get the blue book out of the pile and the fixed one into it. We’d go to his office right when the seminar was letting out and one of us would distract him and the other would do the things with the books. The rest of us would have the test answers going in and we wouldn’t have to do all that.”
“And that worked?” Bennis asked. “Really?”
“It worked for months,” Janice said. “I don’t think it would have, except that he always used test days to meet students, so he was pretty much distracted or he’d be out of the room in the hall talking to somebody. It was a two-semester course and it worked for everything except the big midterm at the end of the first semester, and that was a scramble, but I think it would have worked all the way through if Martha hadn’t turned us all in.”